Since vileru mentioned 'extensive reading', I'll mention 'condensed reading'
again because I think it's cool, plus that site (
http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/tesl-ej/ej32/a1.html) seems to be down so I want to paste the relevant sections before it disappears from Google's cache/results... I recommend skimming through the whole thing and reading 'students w/ access to corpora' as 'self-studiers who use digital materials/subs2srs/etc.':
Corpora and condensed language exposure
Language learners in countries where the target language is not widely spoken often lack opportunities for the rich language exposure that is essential for developing the ability to recognise patterns. Extensive reading (Nation, 1997; Susser & Robb, 1990) is believed to facilitate language learning, because it exposes learners to real language use in context, and in amounts far larger than the short texts and dialogues usually preferred for the presentation of new language items. Extensive reading is also regarded as an effective way to help language learners develop intuitions as native speakers do (Krashen, 2004). The pattern-recognition example in the previous section gives an indication of how focused language exposure can be used actively, in order to formulate intuitions about language use.
Representative corpora can offer condensed exposure to language patterns. It is not argued here that corpora should be the sole vehicle for the development of reading skills and strategies, [12] nor is it argued that corpus use can replace out-of-class reading. Rather, what is being suggested is an approach that shares characteristics of both intensive and extensive reading--what might be called
condensed reading. The reading of corpus samples is intensive in the sense that learners focus on the behaviour of specific language features; it is extensive in the sense that learners examine language features in a larger number of texts than in conventional text-based techniques. Condensed reading enables learners to engage with language use in context in order to formulate and check, though not necessarily consciously, hypotheses about language structure and use.
One printed page contains 500 words on average. [13] The British National Corpus contains 90 million written words, or the equivalent of approximately 180,000 pages. A six-year language teaching programme of five one-hour lessons per week amounts to a total of about 1,000 lessons. To gain exposure through reading to the amount of language evidence contained in a 90 million word corpus, a learner would need to examine about 180 pages per lesson (in the case of classroom or intensive reading), or read about 80 pages every day of the year for six years (in the case of out-of-class or extensive reading), the equivalent of two to three books per week.
Through corpora, learners will experience types of texts that they may not choose to read out of class, or that teachers and materials writers may not deem appropriate. It seems clear, then, that learners may benefit from using corpora in addition to pedagogical materials and authentic texts. [14] The considerations listed here also highlight the limitations of pedagogies that avoid the use of materials and a pre-planned focus on language, such as the ELT translation of Dogme (Thornbury, 2000). These approaches tend to favour class discussions loosely structured around topics, with the teacher and learners acting as the main, or even sole, sources of language exposure. In doing so, they offer limited exposure to language, which is usually further restricted to the teacher's language variety and preferred usage. [-10-]
Bonus:
A corpus in the mind?
Intuition, or 'a feel for the language,' is what learners aim to develop. Native speakers develop that 'feel' partly through exposure to language in use and the recognition of patterns. Through this exposure, native speakers build the mental equivalent of a corpus (Bod, 1998). Intuitions can be seen as the results of the informal analysis of this
mental corpus. It follows then, that by working on representative examples from language corpora, learners will be helped to recognise recurring patterns of structure and meaning. As Stern states, language learners need to be helped "to see a particular feature ... not merely as an isolated item but as part of an evolving system of interrelationships which should become increasingly differentiated as it grows" (1992, p. 145). The wealth of instances of use of a specific item that corpora provide can offer the amount of evidence required for learners to refine their perception of it.
Edited: 2010-02-13, 3:52 am
. Got it working now. The odd thing is it still displays an error message when I use it, even though it is now saving to the file. It seems really oldschool to have to type a file path. Rikaichan really ought to let you browze for a file location from within the settings.
